Patricia M. Crawford, 1941-2009

The distinguished social and gender historian, Patricia Crawford, died aged sixty-eight on 28 April 2009, after a heroic eight-year battle with cancer. Born Patricia Marcia Clarke on 31 January 1941, Trish was the eldest child of Jim Clarke (a marine surveyor) and Enid Fussell. A younger sibling, Peter, predeceased her. An early memory was of the family's move from sunny Sydney, with its bonus of several doting aunts, to cold rainy Melbourne, where Trish grew up. Trish completed her undergraduate studies in history at the University of Melbourne. Here she also met her future husband, Ian Crawford, an anthropologist who has spent most of his life studying and befriending the Aboriginal peoples of northwest Australia. Married in 1962, the couple moved to Perth, where Ian took up an appointment in Aboriginal Studies at the Western Australian Museum and Trish began postgraduate work at the University of Western Australia. UWA was to be her home institution for the remainder of her academic career, first with a long series of temporary contracts (because of the University's ban on employing married women), then as a tenured instructor in 1976, and finally in 1995 as the first female professor in the history department at UWA. Throughout her career, she was to fight many protracted battles to change her institution's discriminatory policies against female colleagues and students.

Her graduate studies in English history entailed numerous trips to England to carry on archival research. Recalling these years, Trish expressed deep gratitude for her husband's support, both in helping to care for their young son Rupert, and for easing the burdens of domesticity. Trish remarked she could always look forward to an appetizing hot meal, cooked by Ian, when she returned from a long day at the 'rock face'. She had a passion for digging deep into the archives and experienced a real thrill whenever she unearthed a hitherto unknown document which shed light on the lives of ordinary men and women, for whom historians like Lawrence Stone had insisted there were no historical records to be had.

Her PhD thesis, a study of the career of Civil War politician Denzil Holles (1598-1680), became a book which was awarded the prestigious Whitfield Prize by the Royal Historical Society in 1979. Trish had already demonstrated a broader perspective on political history with her first scholarly publication, 'Charles Stuart, That Man of Blood', published in the Journal of British Studies (1977) at a time when it would not have occurred to most historians that a 'primitive' anthropological concept like 'blood guilt' might help explain the political views of English men and women.

Now that we take for granted the importance of the body as an analytical concept, it is difficult to imagine the great courage Trish showed in submitting her landmark scholarly article, 'Attitudes to Menstruation in Seventeenth-Century England', to the journal Past and Present three decades ago. In 1981, when the article appeared in print, bodily functions were a shockingly taboo subject and the study of gender difference in history was dismissed by most established historians, female as well as male, as a laughable waste of time. Now considered a classic, 'Attitudes to Menstruation' was followed by other pioneering articles which were to change the direction of early modern studies during the 1980s and 1990s. Collected into a volume, Blood, Bodies and Families in Early Modern England (2004), these essays explored topics which stimulated new areas of historical inquiry: gendered bodies, maternity and paternity, sibling relations, female culture, sexuality and sexual knowledge, family ideology. Other path-breaking essays appeared in edited collections and other venues, notably 'Women's Published Writings 1600-1700', accompanied by an exhaustive checklist of seventeenth-century Englishwomen's printed works (in Women in English Society 1500-1800, ed. Mary Prior, 1985). The essay and checklist opened up the field of early modern women's writing to an interdisciplinary audience, offering literary scholars as well as historians the opportunity to hear the authentic voices of seventeenth-century women.

Perhaps the greatest impact Trish had on...